There’s a particular frustration I hear often from established business owners when the conversation turns to their online reputation, and it usually arrives in the same words.
“We’ve been doing this for fifteen years. Everyone round here knows us. So why are we losing jobs to someone who started last spring?”
It’s a fair question and the answer is rarely about quality. The businesses asking it are usually excellent. That’s the whole point. They have a genuine reputation, built slowly, one satisfied customer at a time. What they don’t have is any version of that reputation a stranger can see.
**Word of mouth has a ceiling, and most people hit it without noticing**
A recommendation is a wonderful thing. It’s also fragile and small.
It only travels as far as the person making it. It only works at the exact moment someone happens to ask. And it disappears the second the conversation ends. If your neighbour mentions you at a dinner party and the person listening isn’t renovating anything that year, that recommendation is simply gone.
So a business can be genuinely well regarded and still be invisible to nine out of ten people who need it. The reputation exists. It’s just stored in people’s heads, where nobody can search it.
The newer competitor isn’t better. They’re just findable, and they look reassuring when someone finds them.
**What actually happens when you are recommended**
Here’s the part that surprises established owners the most, and it’s worth sitting with.
Even when someone is personally recommended to you, they still check you online first.
I watched this happen with a friend who’d been given the name of a decorator by someone she trusted completely. She still searched him. She found a Facebook page last updated in 2022 and no website. She didn’t ring him. She went back to the person who’d recommended him and asked, slightly awkwardly, whether he was still working.
That’s a job that nearly evaporated on the way from a recommendation to a phone call. Not because of anything he did badly, but because there was nothing to confirm he was still there and still good.
The recommendation opens the door. Whatever they find when they look you up decides whether they walk through it.
**Turning goodwill you already have into proof anyone can see**
The good news is that an established business is sitting on the raw material. Years of happy customers is exactly the asset. It’s just never been written down anywhere public.
The way to fix it is less uncomfortable than most owners expect. A few things that make the difference:
Ask soon. The window is roughly 24 to 48 hours after the job finishes, while the relief and the goodwill are still fresh. Ask three weeks later and you’re asking someone to remember how they felt.
Ask specifically. “Could you leave us a review” is easy to ignore. “Would you mind leaving a quick line about how the bathroom turned out?” gets a response, because you’ve told them what to write and made it small.
Make it one tap. A direct link straight to the review box, sent by text. Not a link to your homepage. Not instructions on how to find you. Every extra step loses people who genuinely intended to help.
Ask everyone, not just the delighted ones. Owners tend to cherry-pick the customers they think loved them most. It skews the picture and it makes the whole thing feel like a performance. Ask consistently and you get something that reads as real.
And when someone says yes and then forgets, which many will, one gentle nudge a week later is fine. Most people meant to do it. Nobody minds being reminded once.
**Putting the proof where the hesitation actually happens**
This is where I see the most wasted effort. Businesses do the hard part, collect genuinely lovely reviews, and then hide them.
They end up on a page called Testimonials that almost nobody visits. Or behind a link that says “see our Google reviews”, which asks a hesitant customer to leave your site at the exact moment they were nearly convinced.
Put the proof where the doubt is instead. A couple of reviews sitting next to the contact form, not on a separate page. Photos of your own completed work rather than stock images, ideally with a line about what the job was. Your credentials with the registration number visible, not just a badge.
And show the dates. A review from last month tells someone you’re busy and current. A wall of undated praise makes them wonder quietly when the last one was.
**Keeping it going without it becoming a job**
The instinct is to do a big push. Owner decides to sort this out, messages forty past customers in one weekend, gets fifteen reviews, feels pleased, and never does it again.
Twelve months later the newest review is a year old, which reads worse than having fewer reviews spread out.
A trickle beats a burst. Two or three a month, forever, is the version that works. In practice that’s asking every customer as you finish, which becomes automatic within a few weeks, and about twenty minutes a month checking that it’s still happening.
That’s genuinely the whole system. No agency, no budget, no marketing knowledge required.
**Why this is worth doing**
What I like about this particular piece of work is that it doesn’t ask you to become something you’re not. There’s no personal brand to build and nothing to fake. The reputation is already there and already earned. All you’re doing is writing it down somewhere a stranger can find it.
For a business that’s spent fifteen years doing good work quietly, that’s often the only thing standing between them and the enquiries going to the newer, louder competitor down the road.
Author
James Tandy,
Founder, JTandy (https://www.jtandy.co.uk/)
Follow Womenlines on Social Media
